Had it all been a lie?
Did I live a fairytale?
Once upon a time there was a little blind girl, and she lived in a little cottage, in a great big woods with her mother. The little girl liked to collect flowers and mushrooms and butterflies and bring them back to her mother as gifts. She loved to play and explore, and one day she said to her mother, “mammy, when I grow up, I want to go to the city and plant flowers in the streets.”
The little girl could not see, however, that the woods were growing darker and darker by the day. The mother, knowing her little girl would never be able to protect herself from the beasts that dwelled within, brought her down to the cellar and told her, “now, little flower, trust your mother, for I know best. You’ll be safe down here forevermore…”
She hadn’t really meant forever… had she?
Did I live a fairytale?
Once upon a time there was a little blind girl, and she lived in a little cottage, in a great big woods with her mother. The little girl liked to collect flowers and mushrooms and butterflies and bring them back to her mother as gifts. She loved to play and explore, and one day she said to her mother, “mammy, when I grow up, I want to go to the city and plant flowers in the streets.”
The little girl could not see, however, that the woods were growing darker and darker by the day. The mother, knowing her little girl would never be able to protect herself from the beasts that dwelled within, brought her down to the cellar and told her, “now, little flower, trust your mother, for I know best. You’ll be safe down here forevermore…”
She hadn’t really meant forever… had she?
Yarrow holds her breath and thrusts herself up against the heavy, diagonal wooden doors. She expects them to protest, to clank with the nauseating and cruel sound of iron chain links rasping together, as they had time and time before. But as she presses her nose, gentle but firm, against the oak, they lift a little, blowing cold air across her face.
And when she grunts, shouldering through, they burst open and this time she does not squeal, recoil and let them slam shut again, cursing the radiant flood of light she could not see but could feel. This time she tumbles from the cellar, landing on her knees in the untouched snow.
Morning sun touches her, strewn across her mottled form in slants and dapples shaped by the near-naked canopy above. Though the air is clean and cold, and snowflakes settle, soft and fat, into the nooks of skin and bark and petal, she is warmer than she has been in a long, long time.
She does not blink as she might if she could, hard and forceful, having just slipped through the sill between such shuttered darkness and untouched white. But her body tightens around itself as she finds her feet, knees quaking. Muscles throb as she traces a slow, orientating circle in the snow, chest heaving.
The invocation mammy grows expectant and heavy in her throat, like a stuck morsel or a squeezing hand.
But, she knows. Perhaps, she’s known for days, as she grew more and more hungry and more and more sure of her imminent withering away.
It dies on her tongue, releasing as a soft whimper instead as she turns her head towards the lean-to cottage, painted in peeling and sun-bleached cobalt-blue and bumblebee-yellow. Its shutters clack gently against the walls as the wind pushes and pulls. The door, too, creaks its soft-spoken and eerie language—wide open, with nothing left inside.
She cannot see it, but she imagines as it yawns, open and closed, what reveals behind it’s warped and rain-rotten jaws is a black much blacker than even her own. An abyss. Beyond those walls—once, Home—is now a Cimmerian depth so complete it would eat her whole again. Swallow her back down into its dank and sunless gut. Into the place she had been planted, like a stunted peony, amongst the spores and damp pages of old botany tomes, and instead of be safe from the sundry monsters, she became sad.
She runs—
She runs from the emptiness. She runs from the wolves and from the wraiths; from the way she knows that none of them are real—except that they are to her, and always have been. Have been the architecture of her life, of her solitude and of her love. The needle and thread that seamed her to a world made just for her—a fairytale that never had its happy ending because there was never going to be a prince, or a kiss, or a sweet revival from a glass coffin. Nothing that would not be reckoned with destruction in the end; tithes paid for disobedience and ingratitude.
Dry and brittle snares of bramble and tree-limb grab and pull at her, digging deep into the darkened plain of cheek and curve of shoulder, drawing thin scratches that bead with blood. She runs down overgrown paths still etched in her mind from girlhood—places she had walked in her reveries for years. Tracing the familiar knolls, crouching in favoured hiding spots and running her nose over the grass and bark and starflower petals.
With some luck, winter had drawn its scythe across Viride, clearing her way except for the odd fallen log that trips her up, scraping her knees as she scrambles for purchase.
She runs until she feels her heart might burst, lungs stinging with each gasp of cold air. The world whirls around her; looms and leans. In the shadows she cannot see, but can feel, as sure as the bruises throbbing to life on her skin, eidolon take shape and disperse. Hulking beasts and fanged creatures—darknesses, shades of everything that was and was not—facts and fictions, and the weird places where they touched and became her fable—come together like jaws around her.
She shivers, the Yarrow-flower, leaning against the rough bark of a stripped oak tree, pressing her floral face against its ungiving stiffness. She tries to forget what happened to the little girl when she wandered into the woods.
Voice | @anyone
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